NEW JERSEY, USA — Janice Harayda, editor-in-chief of One-Minute Book Reviews, announced today that children’s books would be eligible for the first time for the Delete Key Awards for the year’s worst writing in books.

Ms. Harayda said that she had opened the annual awards to children’s books to in the interests of diversity. She said the change would allow the Delete Key Awards to represent better the full range of literary bottom-feeders.

“It isn’t fair to suggest that adult-book publishers are the only ones shoveling junk at us,” she said. “Not when we have everything from cheesy knock-offs of The Velveteen Rabbit, which was inadvertently allowed to go out of copyright, to Steve Martin making fun of people with disabilities in an alphabet book for 2-to-4-year-olds.”

Ms. Harayda said she hoped that the decision to include children’s books would make the prizes fairer and also encourage Martin to stick to making movies “unless they were like Sgt. Bilko.” She noted that some people might see the change as a technicality given that the 2007 first runner-up, Mitch Albom’s For One More Day, is written at a third-grade reading level, according to the Flesch-Kincaid readability statistics that are part of the spell-checker on Microsoft Word.

The finalists for the Delete Key Awards will be announced beginning at noon on Friday, Feb. 29, and the winners on March 15. Anybody may nominate a candidate for one of the awards by leaving a comment on the site or sending an e-mail message to the address on the contact form.

Ms. Harayda reminded people that she does not accept free books from publishers even if they would send them to her “which, let’s face it, no same publisher would.” She is an award-winning journalist who has been the book columnist for Glamour and book editor of the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio.